Poverty is not just an absence of wealth

Jonathan Aitken is not the only Conservative politician being rehabilitated this week.

Iain Duncan Smith, who was chased from the party leadership four years ago, is making an even more impressive comeback.

His diagnosis of social breakdown in Britain has been widely accepted by commentators from Left and Right.

Now come his prescriptions.

Mr Duncan Smith's argument is easily enough summarised. Poverty, he believes, is not simply an absence of wealth. Rather, it is a state of mind, an attitude to society, a set of assumptions about what you can achieve.

It follows that poverty won't be ended by giving money to poor people.

There are other factors involved: family breakdown, truancy, drug abuse, gang culture, alcoholism.

Until we tackle these problems, we are bailing out the tub while the taps are left running. Giving a cheque to someone who has problems with substance abuse will not help him in the long run. No amount of baby bonds and Sure Start schemes can compensate for absent fathers.

Janet Daley writes opposite about the new ideological divide between the parties.

It is no longer socialism v capitalism, or nationalisation v privatisation or even higher v lower taxes.

It is to do, rather, with empowering citizens. Gordon Brown's approach to welfare is typical of his centralism: he believes, despite 50 years of evidence, that poverty can be eliminated by state agencies.

The Tories, who for too long left this agenda wholly to the other side, are now coming round to a convincing alternative critique.

The best way to insure against poverty is to anticipate the conditions that cause it. People should make the decisions likeliest to inoculate them from poverty, such as getting qualifications and getting married.

It follows that the Government helps people most by encouraging an atmosphere in which these become the obvious choices.

Often, that means that the state should fund social programmes, but leave their operation to those better qualified than Department for Work and Pensions bureaucrats, such as local charities and churches.

Earlier this year, as part of our Think Local series, we advocated a radical decentralisation of social security, modelled on the 1996 Clinton reforms.

We were delighted when, in a little-noticed passage of his party conference speech, David Cameron picked up this theme, drawing explicit inspiration from the successful welfare reforms inaugurated in Wisconsin and since widely copied.

That this agenda should have moved from our pages, and those of a few free-market think-tanks, into the manifesto of one of the main parties, is in large measure thanks to Mr Duncan Smith who, reasonably but doggedly, has brought his colleagues round to the notion that welfare reform, far from being a vote-loser for centre-Right parties, can be a popular crusade.

The existing dispensation has visibly failed those who most need help. It is time to offer them something better.